Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Republicans optimistic, Democrats skeptical

When it comes to the outcome of this fall's election American voters have come to pretty much the same conclusion as the pundit class: Republicans will take control of the House but not the Senate.

Our newest national survey finds 46% think the GOP will get the House to 32% who think it will not. But only 36% think it will take the Senate and 40% disagree.

Republican voters are extremely optimistic about their party's prospects for this fall and that may be part of what is driving the high level of enthusiasm on their side. 74% think their side will get back the House to only 7% who disagree and 62% think they'll get the Senate with 14% dissenting.

Among all respondents 64% said they were 'very excited' about voting this fall. But with Republicans who think their party will take back power that figure is 78%. The conviction that their votes are going to bring about a change in control of Congress is driving GOP voters out to the polls.

Democratic voters are a lot less sold on the GOP's chances. Only 22% think they'll take control of the House and just 17% think they'll get the Senate. That could be part of the problem in motivating the party base to get out this year. If the rank and file don't think there are going to be serious consequences for the party if they don't vote it doesn't give them much incentive to go do it. There's some precedent for that already this cycle: post election polling in New Jersey and Virginia showed most of the people who stayed home were happy with how things were going. They had no sense of urgency about voting and their party's candidates paid the price.

We found a 45-44 generic ballot lead for Democrats on this poll but it's among registered rather than likely voters and as we've said repeatedly the party's problem this year isn't really that voters are abandoning it but that its own voters aren't planning to come out to the extent they need to.

12 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This is interesting. If you add up very excited voters and somewhat excited voters you get 39-38 Rep. The not so exciteds go heavily Dem. This poll projects to 52 percent of the 2 party vote for Dems rather handily. Even with likelies. Our polls show a 50-50 race with the tie being enthusiasm based. Otherwise Democrats would wax them. If Boehner holds tax cuts hostage, we have data to suggest Dems could hold losses under 10 in House and 2 in Senate, so stay tuned to as American politics is as unstable as it has ever been.

PPP should do a battleground poll of likely voters. Pick the top 100 districts.

Any polling out there has to factor in the democratic seats in new york city, los angeles, boston, chicago, houston, miami, etc... where the democrat receives 80% of the vote. This should be discounted in any generic ballot. There are very few GOP districts that are like this.

Oh, I see--your sample is RV not LV. While an RV sample with a D+5 party ID is not completely unreasonable (although it still tilts a little too Democratic), a generic ballot result based on RV is not very meaningful at this point in the cycle. Why would you switch back to RV, other than partisan cheerleading?

Funny you don't ask if there's any place for moderates on the Democrat plantation. Anyone who didn't vote for the socialist healthcare tyranny or the cap-and-trade fix for the phony global warming fraud or support the abolition of secret ballots for unionization was targeted by the thugs and slavemasters of the Demoncrat Party.

"Your sample skews too Democratic. There is little chance that the electorate this November will self-identify as D+5."

As we've already discussed, the sample is, as always, of registered voters, not likely voters. It's useful to compare what's actually being seen in this fall's races to what would have happened had all registered voters who sometimes but not always vote had showed up.